Mozilla Checks If Firefox Is Affected By Same Malware Vulnerability As Tor (arstechnica.com)

Mozilla is investigating whether the fully patched version of Firefox is affected by the same cross-platform, malicious code-execution vulnerability patched on Friday in the Tor browser. Dan Goodin, reporting for ArsTechnica: The vulnerability allows an attacker who has a man-in-the-middle position and is able to obtain a forged certificate to impersonate Mozilla servers, Tor officials warned in an advisory. From there, the attacker could deliver a malicious update for NoScript or any other Firefox extension installed on a targeted computer. The fraudulent certificate would have to be issued by any one of several hundred Firefox-trusted certificate authorities (CA). While it probably would be challenging to hack a CA or trick one into issuing the necessary certificate for addons.mozilla.org, such a capability is well within reach of nation-sponsored attackers, who are precisely the sort of adversaries included in the Tor threat model. In 2011, for instance, hackers tied to Iran compromised Dutch CA DigiNotar and minted counterfeit certificates for more than 200 addresses, including Gmail and the Mozilla addons subdomain.

Comments

Re:It's not hard to hack a CA

[Hizonner]

The idiots behind let's encrypt don't understand that the first and role of the public CA system is identity non-repudiation, but they issue certificates with any name to anyone who asks.

You don't have a damned clue how this stuff works, do you?

All the public CAs issue non-EV certificates based on the ability to control email and/or DNS information for domains, and most of them automate it. Their verification standards for non-EV certificates are on page 13 of https://cabforum.org/wp-content/uploads/CA-Browser-Forum-BR-1.3.7.pdf.

Let's Encrypt does exactly the same verification and meets those standards. Let's Encrypt is actually ahead of some of them in that it uses a published and publicly reviewed verification protocol (ACME) to check control over the DNS.

Yes, the CA infrastructure is shit, mostly because all you have to do to impersonate any domain is to find any CA you can trick. No, Let's Encrypt is not any worse than the hundreds of other CAs that the browsers trust.